


In This Valley of Dying Stars

by ncfan



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alienation, Chapters bound by a thematic thread, Chapters of wildly varying length may be in your future, Don't copy to another site, F/M, Gen, Headcanon Autistic Character, Isolation, POV Female Character, Post-Time Skip, Pre-Het, That may change in future chapters, They haven't been given tags of their own because they don't have enough of a presence, Trauma, Triptych, other characters make cameos
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-12
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-10-17 09:07:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20618501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: After five years, things had changed. Naturally. Life was change--but not for her. Melusine awoke to find some things changed almost beyond recognition. Whether she could find the familiar in them again was another matter.





	In This Valley of Dying Stars

Never had Melusine been particularly fond of noise. By noise, she did not mean the sound of a river flowing or a bird chirping, or a conversation being conducted in soft tones on the far side of a room. By noise, she meant the sort of all-encompassing din that couldn’t be escaped no matter how far you traveled from the center of it, except by quitting the area entirely. Work had not taken her or her father to cities often, but Melusine had never met a city she didn’t hate. It wasn’t just the bombardment of noise, but that of smells and textures and the constant, unending movements on the periphery of her vision, the ever-shifting array of colors that would have been beautiful if they would just _stop_—

She could go on, if she could find it in herself to put these things into words. But putting such things into words had never come easily to her, especially not when it seemed very much as though there was no one else nearby who shared this way of experiencing the world. She had tried, once or twice, and been met only with confusion. She had stopped.

Garreg Mach Monastery had not been quite as bad as a proper city, especially not where _noise _was concerned, but when Melusine taught here, it was a rare day when she didn’t go to bed with at least a mild headache. (Migraines first, before they dissipated into headaches, before they became migraines again after her father died. “I can definitely feel the tension in your neck and shoulders,” Manuela said, the first time Melusine went to her for a headache cure, “but my, I would never have been able to tell just from looking at you.” Melusine had never thought she hid pain that well, or very well at all. It still surprised her when others were surprised.) It was cleaner than the cities Melusine had visited, and there were fewer people, and in the early mornings and late at night, it was actually quite nice, but in the entrance hall, the reception hall, and _especially _the dining hall, she would have appreciated more quiet. In that noise, it was difficult to think. In that noise, it was difficult to do anything that wasn’t drown in it.

But perhaps, in the nearly-year that Melusine had spent living and teaching in Garreg Mach, she had become accustomed to the noise. Now, when she traversed the narrow path from the front of the entrance hall to the fishing pond crusted with glittering ice, when she made her way carefully up the snowy, _icy _steps to the dining hall, she could hear no shouts of laughter, no snatches of conversation, no footsteps or mumbling about assignments or exams. What she heard was the howling of a northerly wind, heard its hollow promises of wind and snow, and it made for a poor companion, when compared to the things it replaced. Poorer than she would have thought.

Time reveals all things. As the advent of spring revealed new growth emerging from the snowy ground of winter, the passage of time would reveal possibilities thought to be out of reach. This place could be a home again.

Maybe.

Melusine pushed open one of the double-doors into the dining hall, noting with dissatisfaction that the door was warped and no longer fit properly on the frame. The floor in front of it was littered with dry, wrinkled brown leaves that sat in clumps, quivering with the breeze the fully open door had brought them. From far down the hall, snatches of conversation reached her ears, and by this time, she wasn’t surprised at all to feel relief within her at the sound. She stepped inside, and listened.

“—get all the way here from Fhirdiad by yourselves?” a somewhat incredulous Ingrid asked Mercedes and Annette. Both of those asked sat at one of the tables, the former organizing the rations those travelers present had brought with them, and the latter rearranging her pack.

Mercedes smiled up at Ingrid, a smile others called serene, but Melusine had always considered closer to placating—something meant to make the other person in the conversation change the subject. “Oh, you make it sound as if it was difficult.”

“You… would have had to cross an active warzone to make it here.” Ingrid stared at Mercedes and Annette, both nonchalant, in turn, her incredulity only deepening. “Felix, Sylvain, and I, we took a detour through Alliance territory to try to avoid the worst of the fighting, and we still got caught up in it.”

“Not my fault!” Sylvain said quickly. He was sat at the table down from the one Mercedes and Annette sat at, cleaning blood off of his gauntlets; his hands gleamed wetly in the feeble light that filtered through the dining hall’s now-filthy windows. “That was not my fault.”

“Yes, Sylvain, I _know_,” Ingrid replied tiredly, turning back minutely to nod in his direction. “And yes, we should have listened to you and kept going, but what am I _supposed _to do when I see raiders attacking a village?”

“Remember that we are three people, a pegasus, and a horse, and that we don’t have an army with us?”

“We won, didn’t we?”

Sylvain groaned. “Yeah, Sir Ingrid, we won, and I cannot believe _I’m _somehow the voice of reason right now, after all the lectures you and Felix gave me about ‘the consequences of my actions’ and how I ought to stop taking stupid risks. Considering what happened before you went to hide out with Felix and his dad, I would’ve thought you’d want to keep a _low _profile.”

Melusine’s ears pricked at that, but she said nothing.

Ingrid, meanwhile, turned her attention back to Mercedes and Annette. “But really, how did you two make it here? And on _foot_, too?”

Mercedes, perhaps sensing that the flow of the conversation could be diverted no further from its original destination, waved her hand idly. “Oh, you know.” At Ingrid’s prompting stare, “Really, Ingrid, it wasn’t difficult at all. I’m acquainted with many of the churches in the south of the kingdom, so it wasn’t any trouble at all to seek sanctuary for a day or two when we needed it.”

But there was a hole in that story, and expecting Ingrid not to notice it was foolhardy. “And when there was no church within a day’s march?” Her voice pitched higher towards the end, sounding almost tinny by the last syllable.

“People don’t put nearly as much stock in the kindness of strangers as they ought to,” Mercedes retorted, though her tone wasn’t sharp enough to indicate anything stronger than light admonishment—unless things had changed in the last five years, and Melusine knew she could not discount that as a possibility (She did not relish the task of relearning all of their tones and inflections and expressions and mannerisms. Necessary task, but she did not relish it.). “We didn’t have any trouble finding people who would let us stay the night.” She aimed a sly gaze at Annette—at least Melusine could still recognize that much, after five years when they had all changed so much while she slept (or was dead)—her mouth twitching. “I don’t think the accommodations were quite what poor Annie was expecting.”

Annette shrugged, her face reddening. “I’d never slept in a barn before,” she mumbled.

“You were a natural by the end, though!”

“I was so tired I didn’t _care_, you mean.”

Ingrid pressed her hands tightly against the front of her coat. “Well, I’m glad _someone _was able to rely on the kindness of strangers.” Her brow furrowed. “We didn’t have nearly as much luck on that front.”

There came the discordant clink of metal on wood as Sylvain slapped one of his gauntlets down on the table. He was smiling, but it was a harsh smile, lopsided and sharp-edged. “That’s putting it a bit lightly, huh, Ingrid?”

Ashe looked between the two of them before asking, a bit haltingly, “What happened?”

Sylvain shook his head and laughed bitterly. After a few moments in which he gave no response, Ingrid seemed to decide that the burden of answering would fall on her. She grimaced. “There was a village in House Charon’s territory. Someone there recognized Sylvain—though given _why _they recognized him,” she added sharply, voice raised, “I’m shocked they didn’t try to kill us all outright.”

For once in his life, Sylvain had the grace to look embarrassed. Here was something else that had changed in the past five years; Melusine could not remember the last time she had seen him look honestly embarrassed by something related to the fallout from his womanizing.

“They guessed who Felix and I must be based on our accompanying him, and tried to collect the bounty Cornelia has put out on ‘noble-born traitors.’” Ingrid mashed her lips into a thin, diagonal line. “It took us a week to shake them from our trail. We… mostly slept in the woods after that. There was an abandoned farmstead near the border, but that was the last time we took shelter anywhere during the night.”

Sylvain said nothing. He just ran his hand through his hair and sighed.

“Mercedes, Annette?” Ashe spoke up, now. He had been quiet through much of the exchange that Melusine had borne witness to, and it struck her that his voice had not changed at all. Dimitri, Sylvain, Felix, their voices had all grown at least marginally deeper these past five years, but Ashe’s voice was still as light as it had been in adolescence. “Did either of you have much trouble with bandits or raiders?” He made a face. “I know you can both handle yourselves in a fight, but it sounds like you were traveling by yourselves the whole way. And there would have been the Imperial army fighting in the east and the south, and the hawks and wolves roaming the countryside, too.”

“Oh, we didn’t have much trouble,” Mercedes assured him.

Or tried to. No one who was a part of that conversation looked particularly reassured, and personally, Melusine wasn’t particularly inclined to believe her, either.

“This helped,” Annette added matter-of-factly. She pulled something out of her pack. Upon looking at it, Melusine saw that it was a bolt axe.

And this seemed ripe to inspire yet more questions, but at that moment, Gilbert appeared in the doorway from the upper level of the entrance hall, and Melusine knew she could no longer watch from a distance, uninvolved and silent. Her gut twisted hotly. There had been no need for her to play the voyeur. Old habits—old insecurities—died hard.

Melusine took a few steps into the hall, dead leaves crunching beneath her feet, and the way everyone’s attention locked on her at once, all eyes on her and silence rising ascendant, was barely less unsettling than it had been the first day she had walked into the classroom and the conversations she could hear carrying on from halfway down the green abruptly died. “Now that you’re all—“ But no, they were _not _all there. “Where’s Felix?”

“I’m here,” came a voice from behind her. When Melusine looked back over her shoulder, she saw Felix emerging from the kitchens. His nose was wrinkled. “Nobody else seemed eager to do it, but _someone _had to go check on the food in the cellars.”

Gilbert nodded. “A task best attended to sooner, rather than later.”

“How much of it is still edible?” Melusine asked.

Melusine had never been inside of the monastery’s food cellars, and she only had a vague idea of where the smokehouse was. But between the students attending the Officers Academy and he permanent residents who lived every day of their lives here, there must have been a truly massive amount of food kept in the monastery at any one time. The preternaturally fertile soil in the greenhouse meant that much of what they ate on a day-to-day basis was fresh, but still, there must have been so much food set aside, especially for the winter months.

Five years. Five years it had all just been sitting down there. Melusine didn’t know exactly how long preserved foods could last before rotting too much to eat.

Felix shrugged. As he stepped past Melusine to take a seat next to Sylvain, she caught a whiff of something fetid clinging to his clothes. “There’s a lot of hams down there, and they’re all covered in salt, so they should be fine. I saw rolls of brined cheese, too.”

“We probably need to check on those,” Ashe spoke up. “If the seals have been broken, they may not be good, anymore.”

“We’ll do that,” Melusine promised, nodding. Of Felix, she asked, “Was there anything else?”

“Jars of pickles and jellied fruits and vegetables—_lots _of them. Pickled eggs. Wine bottles. Packs of what I think were dried fish. I also found some—“ Felix’s mouth twisted in a grimace of what was undoubtedly pure disgust “—jugs of milk. At least, that’s what I think they were; it’s not like anyone could be bothered to put a fucking label on the damned things. What do you call something so rotten it doesn’t even smell like rot anymore?” The tone he took with that last question was almost conversational, but the edge in his voice, sharp enough to cut, was so poorly hidden that Melusine had no trouble discerning it.

Annette shuddered. “Mortified?”

Felix snorted. “Sounds about right.” He hunched over the table, elbows making a dull thud against rough wood. “There was more stuff I didn’t get too close of a look at—I needed air,” he explained, in such a tone as to suggest he was embarrassed by the impulse itself. “We’ll be good for food for a while so long as it’s just us and we don’t gorge ourselves—“

Ingrid huffed.

“—but if anyone else starts showing up, it’s not going to be enough.”

From his spot at the far end of the group, Gilbert sighed. “In that case, feeding the residents of this monastery will not be an easy task. I have received word from Seteth. Barring troubles on the road, the Knights of Seiros will arrive at the monastery in three days’ time. Once it is known that the knights have returned, doubtless the monks will begin to return as well.”

The varied looks of dejection and apprehension on the faces of those who were once her students spurred Melusine to speech. They were the words she had always intended to speak to them, in this place. They came to her easily enough. “The situation with provisions was always going to be a difficult one, but it is also one that we can take steps to alleviate. The villages surrounding Garreg Mach are still inhabited. It would not be wise to ask too much of them, and certainly not in the grips of winter, but they may be willing to volunteer something.”

Annette raised her hand, before blushing, setting it down again, and just going ahead and saying, “Do you guys remember Dorothea? Dorothea Arnault, from the Black Eagles House?”

Ingrid murmured assent, Sylvain’s eyes lit up in a way that usually signified trouble, Felix grumbled something to the effect of “How could I forget?”, and Melusine nodded.

Annette pointed northeast. “Well, she’s down in one of the villages near Garreg Mach. Mercie and I ran into her on our way here.” She nudged Mercedes in the side with her elbow. “Right, Mercie?”

Mercedes’s veil fluttered as she nodded. “That’s right. She said she had been taking care of children who lost their parents in the fighting. When we told her where we were going, she said she’d join us here in a few days.”

Ashe looked between the two of them, brow crinkling. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” he asked, a touch hesitantly. “Wasn’t she close with Edelgard when they attended the Officers Academy?”

“If that woman wanted to send someone up here as a spy,” Felix countered, “she’d pick someone less conspicuous. If Dorothea wants to come up here and be cold and hungry with the rest of us, let her.”

Melusine frowned at him, and almost immediately, Felix deflated a little, looking at her a little as if he expected… Melusine was uncertain as to what he expected. “Dorothea has doubtless had much experience of cold and hunger these past five years,” she said softly, “and I will welcome whatever aid she gives us. If she does join us here, she may be able to act as a go-between for the monastery and the villages. But there is more that needs to be done here before we can take that step.

“I intended to teach you all how to ice fish during our time here—“ at this, some of them looked at her with marked interest; even Gilbert seemed to be listening more closely “—but the winter that year was too mild. Now, such is not the case. But before we can fish, we must obtain bait, and there is none here readily available.”

At that prompting, Ingrid’s eyes lit up. “Digging for worms is something I’ve had a lot of practice doing.” And she sounded almost gleeful at the idea of doing so today—at least, if her voice rising in that particular manner still signified glee. “I’ll take that job.”

“Good. There are spades and shovels in the shed adjacent to the greenhouse; you will need them.” Greenhouse. Melusine turned to Ashe. “After five years left unattended, there is unlikely to be anything edible in the greenhouse, but if there is anything there that is fit to eat, bring it here. We’ll eat it at supper.”

Ashe nodded. “If the irrigation system’s still working, there might be something. I’ll get on pulling up any dead plants, too. No sense in letting them stay there when we could be using that ground for planting.” He faltered slightly, gaze shifting downwards. “Dedue would have loved having the run of the greenhouse, even if only for a few days. He was in there every morning before class, to check on the flowers.”

The silence that permeated the dining hall following that remark was stale and sour. No one seemed eager to break it; no one met anyone else’s gaze. Melusine’s stomach churned, her shoulders radiating the ache of a tension that would not cease.

He was not in her care when it happened. They all thought she was dead, and Melusine was not so certain she had not been. It was not likely to be a death Dedue regretted. There was nothing Melusine could have done to prevent it, and nothing that could make it feel any less like her failure.

In happier times, Dedue had planted seeds from Duscur in the greenhouse. It had given him pleasure to watch them grow into flowers that would never again bloom in his homeland, never bloom on salted earth. If Melusine could find the seeds, she would plant them in the earth left fallow, earth that might now cluster only with dead things. There was nothing more she could do.

Someone cleared their throat, and the silence was… Not vanquished. It still loomed over them, and the air was as stale and sour as it had been when this silence was ascendant. But Melusine could no longer let silence hold sway over her. Tempting as it was, that time of her life was past.

“Mercedes, Annette.” Melusine still had some trouble grasping exactly what an apologetic smile was supposed to look like, but she thought she at least had some idea of what an apologetic tone was supposed to _sound _like. “It will not be pleasant, but any rotten food in the cellars needs to be removed from it.”

And sure enough, neither of them looked pleased, exactly, though they didn’t look as displeased as Melusine had expected. “We’ll do our best,” Annette said, words somewhat dragged out, as if, just this once, she would have liked to do something quite apart from her best.

“We don’t want there to be any rotting food still down in there when the kitchen staff get back,” Mercedes agreed, though it was unclear whether the words were meant primarily for Melusine or Annette. “Oh, but Professor? We’d like to sweep all of the leaves out of here first. I’m sure the dining hall will feel much more homey once we’ve done that.”

Melusine suspected it would take more than just sweeping the floor of leaves to make the dining hall truly clean again. Depending on how long it had been since that one door had warped so much as to be incapable of fully shutting, a lot more. It would serve as a first step, though.” Very well.”

“We have other concerns that warrant our attention,” Gilbert said to them, his face set in a more extreme variant of its somber cast than Melusine had seen thus far. “The first is the matter of the dead. A grave must be dug for the bandits and the Imperial soldiers who have died here.” Nodding to both of them in turn, “Felix, Sylvain, I will require your aid.”

Felix nodded in return with a solemnity Melusine rarely saw from him, and thus had some difficulty recognizing at first.

Sylvain nodded assent as well, if somewhat more grimly than solemnly. “That’s gonna take a while, isn’t it? The ground must be frozen solid.”

“Better than letting them rot out in the open,” Felix argued, lip curling in a scowl.

“Hey, I’m not arguing that. We’ve gotta show the dead some respect, no matter what they were when they were alive. And the smoke from a pyre could bring the Empire down on our heads; I get why we’re not burning them. I’m just warning you now. Digging a grave big enough for all those people, at this time of year? That could take days.”

“I’ll come help you, when I’m finished with what I’m doing,” Ingrid offered. She seemed to have reached the same conclusion as Sylvain, for her jaw was set in a hard, blunt line.

“The more the merrier. Well, as merry as work like this can be, right?”

Meanwhile, Gilbert favored Ingrid with a look that was not quite a smile, but was a softening of the normally unyielding stone of his face. “I welcome any aid you can give us. While I do not think it will take _days_—“ here he raised an eyebrow “—Sylvain is correct, in that this will not be an easy task.

“The second matter we must turn our attention to is the restoration of the monastery.”

Which suited Melusine perfectly; surveying the damage had been the task she planned on giving to Sylvain and Felix. This place could be a home again, but only if its wounds were healed.

“For now,” Gilbert went on, addressing the group at large, “we can do nothing more than identify the areas most in need of repair; the work of repairing the damage will be left to those with greater knowledge of such things. I ask that all of you be mindful of your surroundings over these next few days; if a building appears to you to be in such a state of decay as to be unsafe to enter, heed caution, and do not enter it. We have lost so much already; I do not wish for any of you to suffer such a needless death.” He sighed heavily. “And I ask also that when the artisans and construction workers arrive, we have them focus their efforts first on repairing structural damage, as opposed to cosmetic. I… have seen the damage to the interior of the cathedral.” He shut his eyes for a long moment, before opening them again. “It pains me. However, the hole in the cathedral’s _roof _is a far more pressing matter. What was damaged within can be put to rights after that has been mended.”

No easy task, that. Melusine tried to imagine how long it would take just to construct the scaffolding needed to reach the cathedral’s roof, and couldn’t. Once again, she found that she had no past experience with the task that was hers. And yet, it was hers, nonetheless. It could not be shirked.

“Before you go, one last thing.” Melusine looked at each of them in turn, not looking to the next until each had met her gaze. “The monastery is vast, and as of yet, we have not the force required to secure it. There may still be enemies here. I don’t want any of you wandering too far out of sight of each other. Ingrid, dig in the flowerbeds closest to the greenhouse. Ashe, keep the greenhouse door opened far enough that you can hear what’s happening outside.”

Perhaps sensing what she would ask next, Gilbert said, as much to Melusine as to Ingrid, “We will be digging just past the inner gates. If you finish before that begins, I intend to collect the bodies at the base of the Goddess Tower first.”

The Goddess Tower.

As they all dispersed, what they had all avoided mentioning followed them out, inescapable as a shadow.

-0-0-0-

Melusine went first to her old—was it old? Was it really old if it had been five years since she last entered it, but it felt as if it had only been a few days?—room. The tasks set before her called to her, but the clothes she had been wearing the day she fell were unsuited for the harsh winter. Shirt, trousers, houppelande, all were dirty, faded by exposure, and far too thin for the ice and snow. Light armor did not insulate heat nearly as well as the uninitiated thought; its presence here did not help.

It wasn’t until Melusine unlocked the door to her room and found it just as she had left it, albeit stale-aired and buried under a blanket of dust, that it occurred to her that this place ought not to have been found undisturbed.

What followed was a near-frantic search of the room, of the chest under her bed, the dresser on the right-hand wall, the battered little mahogany box where she kept her mother’s wedding ring and the few trinkets she possessed, desperate to ensure that appearances did not deceive and everything was where she left it. When she was finished, she stood in the center of the room, back straight and shoulders stiff, hands trying to curl into fists.

She would have expected the dormitories to have been looted at some point in the past five years, either during the attack, or afterwards. It was well-known that students at the Officers Academy were more often than not the children of noble families; surely, there would have been thieves who would assume there were valuables to be found in their rooms. Melusine wasn’t certain what to make of her room sitting untouched for so long.

Focus on what’s important, not on nagging troubles. It wouldn’t do to open a window just now; while the air might be fresh by the time night came, it would also be frigid, and not all the blankets in the world could make up for that. The clothes she kept in the chest under her bed were considerably less moth-eaten than she had expected to find them, especially her woolen winter clothes. Her body was less dirty than she would have expected it to be after lying in the valley for five years (ending up in the river had probably helped, but still); she could use a bath, but that was going to have to wait.

Melusine wiped the thick, clinging film of dust from her mirror, and bit back a sigh.

No change.

Her face had not changed at all in the years that she slept (Or was dead, surely she would have changed if she was only sleeping, life was change and she had not changed at all). It looked the same as it had before; she was not even sunburned.

Melusine placed a hand to her chest, and felt.

That had not changed, either. She wished it had.

It was better (easier) to focus on what she could actually influence. Melusine finished dressing, took a pot of salve (still good after five years) and a roll of bandages from her dresser, stuffed them into her satchel, and went back outside.

She found Ingrid just where she expected, hunched over the frozen earth of the flowerbed nearest to the greenhouse (the glass of the walls was dingy, stained with dirt and grit; good enough to have asked Ashe to keep one of the doors cracked, for he certainly wouldn’t have been able to _see _what was going on outside), hacking away at it with a spade. She had cleared away the snow, and the ground was so hard that whenever she struck the first blows against a new area, it sounded almost exactly as it would have if she struck instead the cobblestones surrounding the flowerbed. Bright, metallic sounds giving way to the tearing, guttural near-screams of the earth forced to give way to the blade. As Melusine drew closer, she could see beads of sweat glistening on Ingrid’s brow. (If not for the salt, she wondered how long it would have taken for them to freeze.)

“How goes it?” Melusine asked her, once she had drawn close enough that the wind would not have required her to raise her voice to be heard.

Ingrid jumped, her free hand shooting towards the dagger at her belt, before she looked up, blinked against the light, and recognition dawned in her face. “Professor.” Her tone was halfway between what she used when apologizing for some minor gaffe, and what she took when scolding Sylvain for being reckless in his personal affairs—something that managed somehow to be both blunt and sharp. “My apologies. I didn’t see you.”

Melusine nodded, before her eyes were drawn to the small pile of spades sitting out by Ingrid’s left-hand side. Why she had gotten so many was a mystery (were there any left for Ashe?), but that did at least spare Melusine the trouble of going to the shed to get one herself. There was, Melusine noticed, as she knelt down on Ingrid’s right-hand side, a small bucket, likely meant for worms. As of yet, it was empty.

“I haven’t found any yet,” Ingrid explained. She had taken off her gloves at some point while she was digging; when she raised a hand to wipe the sweat from her brow, four thin lines of soil were left in its place. “They may be too far down.” Her mouth twisted as she surveyed the hole she had dug. “I wonder how deep the earth in these flowerbeds even goes.”

Melusine took a moment to look at every inch of the flowerbeds that were in view. The snow blanketed too thickly the beds to see if there were any dead plants lying beneath, but the bushes were still in clear view. They were bare of leaves, and their branches gray and brittle. She pursed her lips, something cold settling in her gut that had nothing to do with the winter that surrounded her.

“If you can’t find any worms, don’t fret.” Melusine struck down into the earth, and winced when it scarcely gave at all, sending a dull spike of pain radiating up her arm. “I intended this to put off having to start eating the preserved food in the cellars, but we were always going to have to start drawing on that eventually.”

Ingrid nodded slowly, shoulders drooping ever so slightly. “I know. I just really would have liked fresh fish for supper,” she muttered.

They dug for maybe a minute more, while Melusine tried to put the words together in her head to ask the question that nagged at her so. When finally she found a combination that made sense, “Ingrid… Why were you in hiding in Fraldarius territory?”

Under Melusine’s watchful gaze, Ingrid’s back stiffened, but she did not balk. “So you heard that?” The tone she carried out of her mouth was almost casual, but Melusine could not miss the weight in it, like a millstone around Ingrid’s neck. “There’s not much to say. About a year after I returned to my family, I received a summons from Fhirdiad. Cornelia had invited me to join her court.”

Even after a year spent in the company of mostly noble students, it still took a little while for Melusine to draw the line between such a thing and Ingrid feeling the need to go into hiding. She had read many books in her life, but few of them had dealt with the more intricate workings of political maneuvers. Realization reached her like the cold had reached her when first she woke: all at once, like someone had stolen all the warmth from the world in one fell swoop. “She tried to take you hostage.”

“Yes, she did.” An odd smile played on her lips. “Without a queen, there are few places for women in the royal court. Typically, in Faerghus, a noblewoman only becomes the head of her house if she is an only child, or the only child in her family to have been born with a Crest. There are many different official posts within the court, but these are typically awarded only to men; Cornelia was always strange, in that. Usually a woman posted to the court holds her position as a member of the queen’s household—were Queen Patricia still alive, my father would likely have petitioned for me to become one of her maids of honor years ago.”

“And now that Cornelia rules in Faerghus…”

That smile morphed into something that Melusine could recognize: bitter. “Now that Cornelia rules, there are more places for women in her court. If… If Queen Patricia still lived, and she had sent us such a summons, my father would have been thrilled. It…” Ingrid fell silent for a long moment, her face twisting in so many different expressions, so quickly, that Melusine could not make any sense of them at all. Finally, she said, stiffly, “It would have been a great honor to my family for the queen to have requested, unprompted, that I join her household. But when such a letter arrived from Cornelia, it was a trap. Obviously.” Her face hardened, her eyes burning. “And I would _not _be the device that forced House Galatea to bend the knee to the Empire.

“My father’s position was… is delicate, but my wellbeing has ultimately always mattered more to him than simple expediency.”

Melusine knew. She remembered Ailell, and Lúin, and a ring. She remembered everything.

Ingrid hacked away at a particularly stubborn patch of earth. “Lord Rodrigue was once to have become my father-in-law; we’ve spoken but rarely since Glenn died, but still, he agreed to give me shelter immediately. I went into hiding on the Fraldarius estate, and meanwhile, my father began putting out that I was terribly ill, too ill to travel, and too ill to be seen. A few months later, he changed tack, and put out that I had died.” Ingrid shook her head, running her hand slowly up and down the handle of her spade. “There is a place for me in the crypt, but my tomb lies empty. That was what it took to ensure my freedom. And do you want to know what the worst part of it was?”

A few answers came to mind, but only one of them made sense. “That you couldn’t join the fighting?”

“Exactly!” Ingrid exclaimed, slapping her spade down onto the cobblestones with a high clink of protest. “House Fraldarius’s position is not so poor that it must feign at neutrality to keep from being overrun; they can fight the Empire openly. But _I _couldn’t even go _outside_, for fear of being spotted by one of Cornelia’s spies. It was worse when they were all away; at least when Felix was around, there was someone for me to spar with.” She sighed heavily, staring down at the ground. “My father’s deception must surely have come to light by now. I hope my family hasn’t had too much trouble.”

The words to ease Ingrid’s worries would not come; they would not even reveal themselves to her mind. What came instead as Melusine rested a hand on Ingrid’s shoulder was a soft, “I’m glad you’re safe.”

Ingrid blinked at her, as if the words she spoke were in some foreign tongue. “I… I’m also…” Her face screwed up, and the next thing she said was a hushed, almost tentative, “Professor… how are you _here_?”

Melusine could only hold her gaze in silence.

What a question to ask an answer of.

“I… saw you fall.” But perhaps it had not been quite the question Melusine thought it was. And now, the words were rushing from Ingrid’s mouth in a torrent: “I’m so sorry. I couldn’t get to you; the Empire brought so many pegasus knights and wyvern knights that I could barely even steer Kyphon without crashing into one of them. I tried, I just couldn’t—“

“Ingrid.” Ingrid’s eyes snapped to her face. They were wide, but clear. “I’m alright. Enough.”

Ingrid nodded stiffly; the breath she took was not quite gasping, but it was still sucked in. “I told the others,” she muttered. She tried to scrape dirt out from under her fingernails, to no avail. “We all thought you were dead. We wanted to search for your body, if only so you could be buried properly, but there were just too many enemy soldiers. We had to retreat. His Highness… he took the news poorly.”

_“You… What must I do to be rid of you?!”_

The cold drifted past Melusine’s blood, taking root in her bones.

“I fell. I don’t know how long I fell.” For a moment, she was back there in the void, tumbling downwards, ever downwards, hands scrabbling for purchase that would never be found, the wind howling in her ears a portent of what awaited her below, the amber sky and winter-brown earth swirling through her vision like a kaleidoscope as the unyielding earth rushed towards her with bottomless hunger. For a long moment, it was difficult to be anywhere else. “I slept.” She wanted to believe it was sleep, even as she knew it had not been. “I slept for a long time.”

“You…” Ingrid’s mouth worked for a long time before sound came out again. “…You slept.” There came a huffing sound that could almost have been a laugh. Maybe it was a laugh. “It’s hard to fathom, but stranger things have happened.” She looked away. “The white beast that appeared on the battlefield, for one. If I didn’t know better, I would say it looked like the murals of the Immaculate One in the cathedral.”

_Rhea…_

_I know what I heard_.

But that was a secret that was not hers to share, a secret that could be dangerous both for the subject of it, and for any who carried the knowledge in their minds. A secret like that could be… burdensome.

“Ingrid.” She had spent too much time here, already. There were other things that needed doing, things that could not wait for the fast-approaching winter night. But one last thing, this one last thing, was not too much to ask, surely. “You and the others can call me ‘Melusine.’ It’s been five years. I’m not your teacher anymore.”

Even if she felt no less responsible for them now than she did then. She was allowed this much, surely…

“I… Hmm.” Ingrid frowned. “I don’t know about that. I think I could call you by your name, in time. You might have some trouble with the others, though—Ashe and Annette, especially.”

Perhaps it had been too much to ask. Still, as Melusine walked away, she could not banish the thwarted longing that had come over her so suddenly.

-0-0-0-

The silence grew more unnatural the deeper Melusine trekked alone into the monastery. For all that she had warned the others of potential enemies lurking in places as yet unexplored, she did not think there was a solitary person here, apart from them.

The hedgerows that lined many of the outdoor paths had grown vast and wild in the time they had gone without being subjected to the indignity of pruning shears. The evergreens now resembled trees, and gave the impression of standing in dense forest; those that lost their leaves with the cold thrust out their naked branches like knives. Great, ropy vines nearly covered whole the wall of the reception hall closest to the classrooms, and meanwhile, all of the trees that had lined the green outside of the classrooms had died.

Melusine knew the noise would have bothered her had it been present, but its absence was utterly unnatural. This was not a place ever meant to resemble a tomb. She would not suffer any attempts to make it into such.

Branches tugged at her cloak as she fought her way down the path into the reception hall. Much the same as the dining hall, the floor of the reception hall was littered with dead leaves. When she looked to the rafters, she could see birds’ nests clustered there, caught the occasional flash of bright eyes. Looking to the walls revealed telltale signs of rot. A sweet, musty odor hung thick in the air; by the time Melusine made it out of the reception hall and a fresh gust of icy wind battered her face in greeting, she was gagging on it.

Winter made giants out of shadows, and not an inch of the bridge was free of the cathedral’s shadow as Melusine crossed it. The last time she had walked this bridge, it was truly dark, but though the shadows were deep, the light was now enough to reveal the state of disrepair the bridge found itself in. It was not yet at the point of being unsafe even to walk across, but the stone railings were visibly crumbling in places, and Melusine spotted two small holes that she could only be relieved she’d not managed to put a foot through before.

Other things were not in such a state of disrepair, however. There was a medical station in the cathedral, off past where the counselor’s box had been; Seteth had shown her where it was after a pilgrim had injured himself and the man needed to be patched up. Few of the places Melusine had called… not home, not exactly, over her years had possessed even the most basic in the way of plumbing, but the monastery was, as with many things, an exception. And sure enough, when she held a basin under the faucet and turned the knob, after a moment’s indecision, water came pouring out.

Melusine took a few clean rags, stuffed them into her satchel alongside the salve and bandages, and set her shoulders. Just as it had once before, the Goddess Tower waited for her.

When she reached the base of the stairs, neither Gilbert, Sylvain, nor Felix could be found there, and all the corpses were gone. Blood smeared the stairs and the dim walls, their dark stains stark against the smooth gray stone they defaced. The surface of the water in the basin Melusine carried trembled with each step she took, and she had visions of one drop of water, just one, escaping the bowl and unleashing a torrent of blood, a flood fit to drown them all. What would it be like, to die with her throat clogged with blood?

If things continued on as they were, she might well find out.

More light graced the interior of the tower now than earlier, but still, outside of where that light touched, the shadows were deep and cold, the air still as if it had never known the warmth of the sun. But there one shadow, one dark, hulking shadow, that made all others pale before it. A patch of dull, dense dark that all eyes pointed towards.

It stirred, ever so slightly.

“You wouldn’t let Mercedes heal your wounds.”

“It’s a wasted effort.” The words came out clearly and quickly enough that he likely had not been sleeping. Beyond that, she could make out nothing.

“I have to disagree.” Melusine stepped out into the light, reveling in the warmth that touched her at the same time that she caught the smell of blood fresher than what stained the stairs. “You’ll suffer for it later if your injuries aren’t treated somehow.”

There came a rumble of something that could have been a laugh, had the bitterness in it not choked the air around it.

There was the almost-laugh, and no words past it. Melusine waited, and still, just the silence. All the while, he looked at her. It was too dark in the corner he sat in for her to make out his face. His head was tilted upwards, gaze trained intently upon her, and she could make nothing out beyond that. But she had a certain sense about the quality of his gaze. Like the way someone would watch something they thought would disappear.

Reluctantly, Melusine stepped out of the light, into the edges of the curtain of shadow that fell over him. She had never been made for winter, and here was the proof; even away from the wind, even wrapped up in multiple layers of clothing, the still cold cut at her skin without mercy. She knelt down, setting the basin down on the floor and taking the salve and bandages and rags out of her satchel.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t move. She was closer, now, looking up into his face rather than down. His face was utterly taut, jaw a rigid line, and sole eye bright with something Melusine didn’t recognize.

She got down on her knees. Softly, she asked, “Are you badly hurt?”

Again, Melusine was met with silence, a silence that grew more fraught with each passing second.

She didn’t know what to do. She really didn’t. All of them had changed in some way over the past five years. With all of them, there were bits and pieces of them that were strange to her now, places where she would be treading foreign terrain until she had learned to familiarize herself with them fully, yet again. But him… He was so altered that she might not have known him at all, had he not spoken with that familiar voice.

It had started before her fall. Something broke, and poison came pouring out through the wound. But at least then, his mannerisms had been something Melusine could still recognize, he could still be talked down. The man who sat before her was transformed almost beyond recognition, and she did not know what to do…

“Will you let me look at your wounds?”

Still, silence. He did move, ever so slightly, and for a moment, as a sliver of light caught on his dark armor, Melusine could see it as nothing but his skin, a hide tougher and more unyielding than the scaly flesh of the Demonic Beasts that haunted the empty places of this land. Miklan screaming flashed through her mind—an old nightmare, resurrected for one more moment in the day.

The moment passed, and it was armor, once again.

(She wondered if he ever took it off anymore.)

She couldn’t force him. He’d always been much taller than her, but now, he was bigger than her father had been when he was still alive, and some of that had to come down to the armor, but armor didn’t account for the height. She couldn’t force him to do anything.

At this point, all there was to do was leave her supplies with him, and hope he would attend to himself once left alone. But one thing still nagged at Melusine. It had struck her like a knife when first she saw it, and whenever she thought of him, it shot up to the forefront of her mind.

“Dimitri.” Melusine leaned forward, right hand braced on the ground, left hand hovering in the empty air, inches from his face. “What happened to your eye?”

The eye that was left widened in something like fury, something like panic. Dimitri recoiled, swatting her hand away as he retreated into the dark. “Leave me be!” he demanded, edging ever further away. “Do not speak to me but to say that we ride for the battlefield!”

Melusine hung there, frozen, staring at him. Then, she sighed (it felt like letting go of all of the air in her lungs at once), and stood, stepping back into the balmy warmth of faint light on stone. Even that did not last long, as dense clouds passed over the sun, and the light faded to gray nothingness.

“Dimitri,” she called out, as she reached the top of the stairs. “This is not a nest where you can sleep. There will come a point when you must come down from this place.”

He gave no answer. Truthfully, she hadn’t been expecting one.


End file.
